Silence breeds impunity - investigations are needed

"To the residents of the Amiriyyah building Please visit the Afaq Center, Sayyid Hadi bridge. Please bring along any paper that proves your rent or ownership of a unit in the building. Thank you for your cooperation."

Thus read a sign on the rubble of a leveled building in south Beirut. The building was hit by a bunker buster on 13 of July 2006, the second day of the war, when the Israeli Air Force hit the Nour Radio Station that used to operate from the Amiriyyah building.

Amiriyyah is a name that takes us to the first Gulf War, specifically to 13 February 1991, when the United States Air Force committed a massacre in the air raid shelter of Al-Amiriyyah in North Baghdad. The shelter was hit by two bunker busters, missiles tried for the first time on Al Amiriyyah, and which left 403 Iraqis dead, 142 of them children under the age of ten. The first of the two penetrating missiles made a hole in the roof in its only vulnerable point, the ventilation system, the exact location of which provided to the US by the Finnish construction company that had built the shelter years before. A few minutes later, another smart missile got in through the hole opened by the first, producing a fireball that incinerated those inside, "leaving like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki only a silhouette of many of them engraved on the ceiling and walls," as one observer put it.

The death of the 403 Iraqis in the shelter and thousands others were counted as collateral damage for the American Desert Storm operation. Under the rubric of "liberating Kuwait from Saddam", a multinational intervention led by the US waged a war against Iraq, during which the civilian infrastructure and country's means of production were systematically destroyed. The "coalition forces" ran 109,876 bombing missions; one every 34 seconds, through which 22,000 civilian installations of all types, from bridges to dams to museums and schools to factories were destroyed with a tonnage of bombs twice that deployed during the Vietnam War. According to the UN, the destruction caused by the war cost Iraq 22 billion dollars. It also left the legacy of depleted uranium residue that still poisons the population today.

The US justified its attack on Al-Amiriyyah by claiming that the shelter hosted a military communications center, a lie that was easily refuted by the international press. The Pentagon then claimed that an "error" had been made. However, the attack was premeditated without mistake. The real object was to terrorize the civilian population, creating a feeling of vulnerability that would lead to a revolt and thus the toppling of the Saddam regime.

Although during the forty days of Operation Desert Storm Iraqi soldiers were driven out of Kuwait, Iraq was subsequently put under a decade of sanctions that caused the death of more than a million Iraqis, half of whom were children - deaths that US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously once said were "worth the price." The sanctions were not lifted until America's Operation Iraqi Freedom was waged in 2003, a war that left more than tens of thousands of Iraqis dead and drove the country into civil unrest, a war waged on the premise of destroying weapons of mass destruction that Saddam allegedly possessed and liberating Iraqis from their dictator to promote democracy and create a new Middle East.

Fifteen years passed between 13 February 2006, the day of the massacre of Al-Amiriyyah shelter in Baghdad, and 13 August 2006. After more than fifteen years, The Amiriyyah building in the southern part of Beirut was hit by a bunker buster tried first in Iraq, but this time it was used by the Israeli Air Force, during a war that was it initially claimed was meant to liberate two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hizbullah but actually set rebuilt Lebanon back fifty years. The destruction of the Amiriyyah building is part of the US-Israel war on Lebanon, during which Lebanon's civilian infrastructure - over 100 bridges, 31 vital installations and more than 15,000 housing units and 900 commercial buildings, including factories - were systematically destroyed by more than 10,000 bombing missions. According to UN estimates, the destruction caused by the one month war will cost Lebanon around 13 billion dollars. The destruction of civilian infrastructure and the death of more than a thousand civilians - more than 39 massacres in 31 days - are US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested, the birth pangs of a New Middle East. In other words, worth the price. As with the US wars on Iraq, the high-intensity war on Lebanon intended to break the will of the people through terrorizing Lebanese civilians, in order to push for the disarming the of resistance, set Lebanon back fifty years -- in other words, to make Lebanon, like Iraq, a developing country. Having failed to accomplish their goal to disarm Hizbullah during the war, the US and its proxy state Israel now maintain a siege on Lebanon, and who knows if the Iraqi scenario of a decade-long blockade will be repeated when "Operation Lebanese Freedom" will be waged.

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This past month, Lebanese artist Youssef Ghazzawi's studio was destroyed by Israeli military bombardment for the third time in his life. The first time was in 1977 when his home in the southern Lebanese village of Khiam was severely bombed. And the second time was in 1983 during the Israeli occupation of Beirut; the apartment building he was living and working in collapsed due to continuous shelling. Under each barrage, his entire studio and most of its contents were destroyed. He had salvaged a few things from the previous two demolitions and was saving them. In the most recent destruction of Youssef's studio his entire life's output was lost. Able to escape the incessant bombing of his neighborhood by Israeli war planes, he and his family returned to his home and studio, both located in Dahiyeh (the southern suburb of Beirut), only to find disaster. Scattered, buried, or torn to shreds in the bombing, were hundreds of paintings, mosaic panels, work on glass and wood, work on paper, sketchbooks, notebooks, precious mementoes, and a vast library of art books in numerous languages.

Youssef, a professor at the Lebanese University, is an artist of breadth and vast experience. He spent many years in Paris studying and later practicing his art. Much of his work bears the stamp of his international experience. His wife, Suzanne Chakaroune, also an artist and art instructor, shared his studio and also lost all of her work.

During a phone interview on August 16, 2006, Youssef discussed what has transpired over the past month, "I was planning a retrospective exhibition of my work from the past 25 years, and all this work is now gone." When asked if he was able to salvage anything this time, Youssef said, "Only some books, the paintings which I pulled out are torn to ribbons; I suppose there might be a chance to restore a couple of them."

Later in the interview he affirmed, "We are all fed up with war and the attacks by Israel ... We know that at any moment they can hit us. I see this war as one against our art and culture, against our progress and development, a war against humanity. We want to create beauty and they find an excuse to demolish us."

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